Jill Schary Robinson, an author and journalist who limned her glittering, complicated Hollywood upbringing in much of her work, beginning with her wry 1963 memoir, “With a Cast of Thousands,” and who found fame for chronicling Hollywood’s darker side a decade later in “Bed/Time/Story,” died on July 19 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 88.
Her daughter, Johanna Simmel, confirmed the death. She did not specify the cause.
Ms. Robinson was the eldest child of Dore Schary, a playwright, screenwriter and studio mogul who was the head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for a time. She grew up in an 18-room Tudor manor in swanky Brentwood — a Hollywood princess chauffeured to birthday parties with all the other Hollywood princesses and princelings, including Jane Fonda (who was an audacious, terrifyingly cool tomboy), Brooke Hayward and Daniel Selznick.
The Schary home was always brimming with movie people: Elizabeth Taylor came to dinner swathed in yellow chiffon and barely spoke. Marlon Brando brought his father. When Clark Gable visited, Jill was so overwhelmed that she spiked a fever (he sent her long-stemmed roses afterward). She was 17 when, at an event with her parents, Humphrey Bogart called her out for “being the only virgin in the room.”
Ms. Robinson was 27 when “With a Cast of Thousands,” an arch but loving look at her childhood and its oddities, was published. At the time, she was married to a Navy officer turned stockbroker, working as a copywriter for an ad agency, contributing to Cosmopolitan magazine and raising two children. A few years later, she was divorced, strung out on amphetamines, struggling with deadlines and disastrously in love with an alcoholic.
“Bed/Time/Story” (1974), her memoir of that period, was cast as a redemption tale of two catastrophically damaged people, Ms. Robinson and her second husband. It sold briskly — and landed Ms. Robinson both in People magazine and on the talk-show circuit. Annie Gottlieb, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said it was “among the great love stories.”
By then, Ms. Robinson — who had feared that giving up speed would kill her writer’s edge — was a few years sober, living in Westport, Conn., and able to finish her first novel, a Hollywood takedown called “Perdido,” which was published in 1978.
In 1980, as a contributor to The Times’s Hers column, Ms. Robinson wrote of her sobriety with typical self-deprecation:
“Even before the drinking began, I had the character of an alcoholic: I longed for attention, to be the center of everything, but I was shy until the magical moment when I collided with alcohol. I still fear, writing about this right now — am I calling attention to myself again?”
Despite the hard knocks, Ms. Robinson was preternaturally optimistic, unguarded, generous — particularly to young writers — and dogged in her work, even if it didn’t always go well.
“She was sort of a luftmensch” — that’s Yiddish for an impractical dreamer — John Lahr, the longtime theater critic and son of the actor Bert Lahr (best known as the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz”), said in an interview. “Always dreaming up projects, bubbling with ideas.”
He added: “We had both been raised in a certain milieu, and we recognized each other and bonded over that. We were raised in the combination of privilege and neglect that was Hollywood. That was Jill’s subject, always: the hilarity of the privilege and the punishment of the neglect. What saved her was her charm and her humor.”
Jill Schary was born on May 30, 1936, in Los Angeles, the eldest of three children. Her mother, Miriam (Svet) Schary, was a painter. Her parents had moved there in the 1930s from Newark, where Mr. Schary’s family ran a kosher catering business, Schary Manor.
Mr. Schary, then an up-and-coming playwright and actor turned screenwriter, was hired by MGM the year Jill was born. He would go on to write more than 40 screenplays — he won an Academy Award for the 1938 drama “Boys Town” — and oversee more than 250 films, including “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” (1948), a domestic comedy starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, and “Blackboard Jungle” (1955), starring Glenn Ford as an English teacher and a young Sidney Poitier as one of his rebellious students.
Mr. Schary taught his daughter, as she wrote in “Bed/Time/Story,” “all the classic Hollywood fables” — which, she said, “somehow all had the same moral: The best thing you can get out of being a star is some real estate in the San Fernando Valley.”
Hollywood children, proxies for their striving parents, suffered as the fortunes of their parents waxed and waned, a trend the Schary family gamely bucked. One year a private, and restricted, girls’ school declined to admit Jill and her sister Joy, though they had aced the entrance exam. There was a quota for Jewish students, they were told; nothing personal.
But when the local papers announced that their father had become head of production at RKO, the head of the school called Mrs. Schary saying there had been a terrible mistake. She replied, tartly, that she, too, had made a terrible mistake and was no longer interested in the school.
Ms. Robinson attended Stanford University for a year; while there, she met Jon Zimmer, a Navy lieutenant. They married in 1956 and divorced nine years later. Her marriage to Jeremiah Robinson, the antihero of “Bed/Time/Story,” also ended in divorce. She married Stuart Shaw, a marketing executive, in 1980; they moved to London a few years later.
In 1990, Ms. Robinson had an epileptic seizure in a swimming pool and fell into a coma. When she awoke, she had no memory of her recent life. Her husband was a stranger. She couldn’t remember that they lived in London, that her children were grown and that her parents were dead.
“Past Forgetting,” her memoir of how she pieced her life together again — stitching her still-vivid celebrity-pocked past with her foggy recent present — was published in 1999. “We are sprung from our own land, after all, and it is only fitting my brain should be built around a fault,” she wrote, punning a bit on California’s seismic tendencies.
“In a language at once conversational, aphoristic and deeply nuanced,” Jonathan Lethem wrote in his review for Salon, “Robinson shows herself coming to understand that even before her amnesiac rupture she was really only constructed of postulates, of stories, of moments; that memory is an illusion and a dance — one she can rejoin if not reconstruct.”
Ms. Robinson was the author of 11 books, including a children’s story, “Follow Me Through Paris” (1983), and five novels.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her son, Jeremy Zimmer, chief executive of the United Talent Agency; her stepdaughters, Susan and Aerin Shaw; her siblings, Joy and Jeb Schary; nine grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. Mr. Shaw died in 2011.
“Hollywood, the American dream, is a Jewish idea,” Ms. Robinson told Studs Terkel for his oral history “American Dreams, Lost and Found” (2008). “In a sense, it’s a Jewish revenge on America. It combines the Puritan ethic — there’s no sex, no ultimate satisfaction — with baroque magnificence. The happy ending was the invention of Russian Jews, designed to drive Americans crazy.”
Growing up, she added, “I wanted to be this guy who could walk away from any situation that got a little rough. Who could walk away from responsibility. The American dream, the idea of the happy ending, is an avoidance of responsibility and commitment. If something ends happily, you don’t have to worry about it tomorrow.”
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